Thursday, September 22, 2005

RHEL licence is wrong

Seriously, what is the point of the RHEL licence?

There are so many "respins" (effectively identical versions) of RHEL (CentOS, Tao, WBEL) then why don't Red Hat bite the bullet, gain more market share (even with the same revenue base) and allow people to download and install RHEL itself.

What Red Hat are charging $349/£200/€279 per Basic ES server per annum for is access to RHN (without grouping a.k.a management) and updates. I am perfectly capable of fiddling the updates so that all servers can gain access them (I don´t - we have over 50 Basic ES licences and use CentOS for less critical machines) so why don´t Red Hat allow other sites to mirror them, and then non-licenced hosts to use yum/apt to get hold of them that way.

You can see bugzilla reports from the CentOS folk in Red Hat´s Bugzilla, so come on. Stop fannying about and bring Red Hat back to the masses.